Only Until This Cigarette is Ended is a group exhibition featuring Nigerian artists Tosin Kalejaye and Olamide Ogunade, along with seven other artists. The exhibition title is based on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem of the same name. The poem sets the tone for an exploration of both collective and personal history by focusing on a time of peaceful introspection and wistful reminiscence. Each of the selected artists investigates this theme, interpreting it through the lens of their own experiences, culture, and background.
The poem by Edna St, Vincent Millay goes:
Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The colour and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.
Image courtesy of Art Plugged
Self-taught Nigerian artist Tosin Kalejaye (b. 1992) uses his art to convey his ideas and impressions about modern society and the everyday Black experience. His portraits convey the artist’s own ideas and experiences around the everyday Black experience. The artist’s work provides a welcome variation on traditional portraiture, tackling the ‘lost’ histories of contemporary Nigerian culture.
Like Kalejaye, the sense of loss is obvious in the work of Olamide Ogunade (b. 1996). Ogunade combines research with physical representation in his paintings, similarly foregrounding discourses about individualism, beauty, and race and situating them firmly in a current context.
The exhibition, Only Until This Cigarette is Ended, will open on the 14th of July and it will close on the 11th of August, 2023 at Pictorum Gallery.
